Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it... a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (the verb "pisar" means to treat the leaves with a chemical substance, one of the first steps in the production of cocaine). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished. - former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe 2002 via Rigorous Intuition (link)

Links

Diamanda Galás

18 October 2009

Those looking for Dan Brown-style compendium of the dark, awful esotherica engineered into our capital's landscape for nefarious sorcerous purposes will be disappointed. Wasserman hasn't seen it. Instead he's discovered a sacred landscape, designed to educate the populace via impression, to incite gnosis, if you will, through a panalopy of visual symbolism: not entirely unlike an initiation ritual.

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Over time, the underpinnings of the Enlightenment and Freemasonry continued to evolve and arrived at another marriage of rationalism and religion that would aspire to the "Method of Science and the Aim of Religion." Part of the insight Wasserman shares with readers is the appreciation of the extent to which Thelemic ideals are already integrated in to the structure of American society and government (if not always perfectly expressed!) and openly celebrated in the public art and architecture of Washington, DC. So mote it be! By Frater Nefer Khabs

Review of The Secrets of Masonic Washington by James Wasserman; Destiny Books; Rochester, VT, 2008. 190 pp from Behutet No. 42. Modern Thelemic Magick and Culture.